184 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



our ease there, and spent a month exploring its strange 

 cities and unknown waters, and yet have been quite 

 soon enough to meet the slow and sly Imperial Com- 

 missioners from Pekin. And what is still more trying 

 to the temper of a naval centurion, our officers and 

 men look upbraidingly, as if their chief was the cause 

 of their past disappointment and present sorrow, and 

 as if it was all our fault that they had been carried 

 aAvay from the fun and excitement of ^angasaki and 

 Yedo to the prosy ugliness of a Chinese city. " Sorry 

 we came back so soon ! " exclaims one of the officers ; 

 " Wished we had stayed longer," says another ; 

 "Might have been there a month, and still been in 

 time," urges a third ; and so on, until, like the French 

 captain who was requested by his crew to return to 

 France as they were " fatigued " of some place where 

 there were no salads to be had, we feel inclined to 

 exclaim, " Go to the devil, my children ! think you 

 that I love this sac-re cochon de pays ? " But we will 

 not ; for, after all, it is only the custom of the service : 

 the captain, like the he-goat of the Jewish ritual, 

 must be the sacrifice ; and assuredly it is good and 

 right that it should be so. 



Did we not always, in our own day, wish admiral 

 and captain in Jehannum for those man-o '-war's cruises 

 of "there and back again"? Bother those sudden 

 sailings with sealed orders, which meant leaving all 

 the clean linen on shore for the laundress to hire out, 

 whilst we wailed over a chest of frowsy shirts. What 



